The Feminist Spectator ruminates on theatre, performance, film, and television, focusing on gender, sexuality, race, other identities and overlaps, and our common humanity. It addresses how the arts shape and reflect our lives; how they participate in civic conversations; and how they serve as a vehicle for social change and a platform for pleasure. It’s accessible to anyone committed to the arts’ political meanings.

Monday, December 19, 2011

When you
enter New York Theatre Workshop’s space on E. 4th St. to see Once, the musical adaptation of the 2007
Irish indie
film (see my 2007 blog post on the film), the well-worn theatre suddenly feels like a party hall. The stage has been transformed into a bar,
replete with distressed old mirrors and sconce lights, and a low counter that
serves double-duty as a place for spectators to get a pint before the play
proper starts and as a secondary acting platform for the considerable talents
of this musically distinguished and emotionally empathetic cast.

In Irish
playwright Enda Walsh’s faithful adaptation, the Dublin
community on
which the story focuses is bound by its music making. The cast is small by musical theatre
standards, since the "community here," usually represented by dozens of
supernumeraries, is the close-knit one of Dublin street buskers and musicians
who remain soulfully devoted to music as an expression of their pining spirits.

Steve Kazee plays “the guy,” a recently
jilted, emotionally and artistically ambivalent singer/song-writer who at the show’s
beginning, after a wrenching solo, has decided to abandon his battered guitar on the street as a kind of remnant of his own lost soul.

But “the girl”
(like “the guy,” also nameless, an odd conceit borrowed from the film)
overhears his ballad and brings him emphatically back to his music and to his
life. Played by the lovely, energetic Cristin
Milioti (last seen at NYTW in Ivo Van Hove’s Little Foxes), she drags him to a music store where she borrows a
piano on which to accompany him in her resonant, equally soulful style. Through sheer will and a bit of artfully withheld
romance, she encourages him to resume his music-making in America, where he can
reconnect with his departed girlfriend and have a wonderful life.

As in the
film, music expresses the duo's personalities and their yearnings. The musical's loveliest and most haunting
number remains the Academy Award-winning “Falling Slowly,” written and
performed by Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová, the original guy and girl who
remain credited for the music and lyrics of this adaptation. The ballad grows as a duet between the two,
whose voices blend perfectly as their separate instruments play a kind of
syncopated, already sad flirtation.

Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova, the original "guy" and "girl"

Although the pair
fall in love as soon as they begin harmonizing together, the musical keeps them
apart rather than uniting this typically central heterosexual couple as more
conventional musical stories are wont to do.
In fact, one of the pleasures of Once
is watching it resist the stereotypical formula. The community that typically mirrors the
central couple's initial opposition—like the cowboys and the farmers who should
be friends in Oklahoma—here are
already united.

Walsh
manufactures some humorous initial conflict between Billy (Paul Whitty), the
music store owner, and the bank manager (Andy Taylor) to whom the girl and guy
turn for a loan to make their album.
When the banker turns out to be a closeted musician (and a
not-so-closeted gay man), he gives the couple the money and joins the band,
overcoming Billy’s suspicion of capitalists to become part of the singing and
playing ensemble.

In fact, that
band of sympathetic brothers and sisters is one of the sweetest things about
this very sweet show. Director John
Tiffany (Black Watch) keeps his
instrument-playing and singing cast on stage throughout Once, John Doyle-style. He
guides them toward saloon-style chairs that line the wide proscenium stage in
between numbers. From there, they watch
the action intently and provide the occasional musical punctuation or
undertone.

The several
acoustic guitars, an electric bass, a banjo, an accordion, a ukulele, a bass,
and two violins, as well as a drum set employed in the climactic studio
recording scene, compose the orchestra, all played by members of the cast. The mournful ballads underscore the fated
love story, and the musicians provide pre-show and intermission Irish pub music
to persuade the audience into the Dublin world of Once.

And the
audience loves it. They approach the bar
on stage willingly before the show and during the intermission, where cast and
crew pull pints of Guinness and other beers.
Several spectators the night I attended danced with the musicians who sang
together center stage, stomping their feet Riverdance-style and making that
particularly Irish sort of merry before the central story got underway.

The pre-show
party is a fun theatrical choice, shaking up, as it does, the conventional
separation between performer and spectator.
The choice to create a pub-style environment that lets the show be small
and intimate, signals from the start that Once
is not aspiring to more typical musical spectacle that would mock the more personal commitments at the film’s heart.

The poster for the original film

The guy lives
with his father (David Patrick Kelly), a crusty old Dubliner named “Da,” above
the vacuum repair shop they run together.
When the girl finds the guy losing heart on the street, she asks him to
fix her Hoover, insisting that he make the machine “suck.” Because she’s Czech—and Walsh gets a fair
amount of mileage from her Eastern European seriousness—she soberly sets about
the task of re-inspiring the guy toward his own talents.

He’s grudging
at first, floundering on the shoals of lost love and confusion about his own
ambitions. But she’s insistent. In the first act, in fact, she’s a bit too
single-minded in her intention to repair his heart, and appears the stereotypical
girl in the service of a guy’s future rather than her own.

But Walsh
gives the character more nuances in the second act. She has a child and a husband who’s on his
way back to Dublin from a trial separation.
And although she’s drawn to the guy, she has a stalwart ethic that
requires her to try to make her marriage work.
That the guy and the girl clearly love one another but don’t become
lovers is a refreshing tactic for a musical.
Their attraction shimmers around the show, and their sad but somehow
right failure to consummate their love makes Once wistful and somehow true about those complicated affairs of
the heart.

Bob Crowley’s
evocative set and costumes are lit beautifully by Natasha Katz, who gilds the
actors with the kind of romantic, introspective warmth that seems to deepen their
emotional complexity. Many of the show’s
scenes take place in squares of light that mark off the space, carving it into
intimate encounters between pairs of characters--the guy and his father; the
guy and the girl; Billy and his date. Once, as a result, is an intimate,
surprisingly quiet affair, in which between the numbers, the characters spend
time simply talking to one another about their desires, hopes, and dreams.

The Czech
background of the girl and her extended family—her mother, daughter, and
cousins figure heavily into her Dublin life—is played for laughs. The cousins, of all the musical’s characters,
are cardboard stereotypes meant to elicit the national confusions and language
humor that comes from immigrants navigating new worlds.

Walsh and
Tiffany handle the film’s international flair with supertitles which, in a
creative twist, project the English dialogue into the characters’ native
tongues. That is, the audience sees the
girl’s exchanges with her family projected in Czech, and some of the Dubliner’s
dialogue projected in Irish. The actors
speak in English with various degrees of Eastern European and Irish accents, none
of which are pronounced enough to get in the way of comprehension.

The show’s choreography
is light and unobtrusive, but occasionally inspired, as when the girl and the
guy, in separate images, seem to sculpt the air with their arms, providing circles
of warmth and intimacy into which one of the other performers walks. For instance, the girl, downstage center,
curves her arm out in front of her, and one of the other women moves into her
embrace, leaning her back into the girl’s chest and circling her arm around her
waist so that the girl can lay her chin on the other woman’s shoulder.

In another
light but poignant dance moment, when the girl listens to the guy’s music on a
pair of large headphones, the two other young women in the cast (both of whom
play the violin) mirror her as she moves about the stage, their hands
outstretched into the air with the exhilaration of listening to sounds you love.

Once is
a charming production, currently selling out at NYTW and poised to move to Broadway
in February. The show’s investors
premiered the production at Diana Paulus’s American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge
before the move to NYTW; they apparently have always planned on a Broadway run.

When the show
moves to the Bernard Jacobs Theatre, I only hope it finds a way to retain the
intimacy of its appeal for a larger audience.
It would be a shame to sacrifice the pub-like atmosphere of the theatre,
and the quiet simplicity of the acting and the singing, or to make the show wholly
bigger for a Broadway crowd.

The appeal of
Once comes from the appropriate scale of its ambitions—to tell a story through lovely ballads,
sung from broken, yearning young hearts.

About Me

I'm a writer who loves going to the theatre and the movies, watching television, reading novels, and then thinking about what all of it means. I teach at Princeton University, in the English Department and in the Lewis Center for the Arts Theatre Program. I also direct Princeton's Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies. I believe in quality writing about the arts and the importance of the arts to social life. I also believe the arts do and should give us pleasure and hope, as well as inspiring our creativity and a more expansive sense of what our lives together can be.